As of June 30, the City of Windsor will pull away from its role at the Isolation and Recovery Centre, 21 months after it opened to shelter temporary foreign workers with COVID-19.
Since September 2020, six city employees with the city's social services department have provided administrative support to the centre, although the contract to operate it is between the federal government and the Red Cross.
A city report suggested the time had come to step away and let Leamington, Kingsville or the Ontario Vegetable and Produce Growers Association take it over.
"We need to get our staff back," said Mayor Drew Dilkens. "We need to make sure we can get the business of the city done."
While the six were working at the centre, Dilkens said the work with the city has been piling up.
Another 150 city staff have been working at mass COVID-19 vaccination sites. Dilkens said eventually, they too will return to their original positions.
"We're giving our partners in the county enough notice. We're saying by the end of June, we will be extricating ourselves from the administration of this operation to either the County of Essex or local municipalities to step up," he said.
In December, Dilkens began a campaign to secure $17.8-million to operate the centre from senior governments for another year. The funding has come through.
"We have all of the manuals. We have all of the support that we can provide. We can do an absolute soft handoff, so there is no hiccup or blip," explained Dilkens.
Since opening, some 1,100 migrant workers have used the centre to recover from the virus.
Meanwhile, the federal government has committed funding to operate Safe Voluntary Isolation Sites until March 2023.
